The Festering of a Wound
by we were here
Summary: "He tells you that you haven't eaten in days, and you wonder when you started to go missing." After Dallas' death, Tim struggles with coming to terms that everything- and everyone- he knows is breakable. A short series tie-in to "Blue Eyed Boy".
1. Chapter One

**Disclaimer-**

S.E. Hinton owns _The Outsiders_. Charles Bukowski owns _Love is a Dog from Hell._

**Author's Note-**

So, I'm trying to write again. This is another Tim Shepard centric-fic, second person point-of-view, which ties into a previous one-shot I've already written, _Blue Eyed Boy, _solely centering on Tim's reflection about Dallas' death_._ Scenes from_ Remember Me _(a one-shot centering around the relationship between Sylvia and Dallas) and_ Inhale _(centering around Tim's life before the events of _The Outsiders_) may also be noted at, but will be vague in context.

It's not necessarily required to have previously read _Blue Eyed Boy _or_ Inhale _to understand _The Festering of a Wound_, but I encourage it only because you'll get a better insight into why Tim acts, thinks, and feels the way he does. Other than that, I hope you enjoy, and constructive criticism is very helpful, if you have any.

* * *

><p>"one day Manuel returned to the place, and<br>she was gone -  
>no argument, no note, just<br>gone, all her clothes  
>all her stuff, and<br>Manuel sat by the window and looked out  
>and didn't make his job<br>the next day or the  
>next day or<br>the day after, he  
>didn't phone in, he<br>lost his job, got a  
>ticket for parking, smoked<br>four hundred and sixty cigarettes, got  
>picked up for common drunk, bailed<br>out, went  
>to court and pleaded<br>guilty.

when the rent was up he  
>moved from Beacon street, he<br>left the cat and went to live with  
>his brother and<br>they'd get drunk  
>every night<br>and talk about how  
>terrible<br>life was.

Manuel never again smoked  
>long slim cigars<br>because Shirley always said  
>how<br>handsome he looked  
>when he did."<p>

- Charles Bukowski, _Love is a Dog from Hell_

* * *

><p><strong>September 1966-<strong>

_Tim._

He exhales your name and it sounds like all the color is dropping out of the world and fading into sepia tone. There is yellow acid on your shirt and green speckles of sea glass on black asphalt, red stars in your eyes and the mint candy you're sucking on is sour, like you've just chewed through a lit cigarette and decided to toss some lighter fluid down to keep everything inside of you from coming back up and exposing itself—the rotting organs and black blood and mauled bones no one is ever allowed to see.

You hate being drunk, but right now, at this moment, you'd do anything under the sun to get a fucking drop of whiskey down your throat. The ground under your feet is shaking so hard—or maybe it's just you—that you have to sit down.

Knees pulled to your chest, head between your legs, eyes shut tight—that's the only thing they ever taught you at Santa Maria Del Popolo, God forbid anyone decided to bomb the church next door and take your sorry-ass private school with it.

Static rips through the dry night air from the car's windows and you swallow down the bile burning the backs of your teeth to enamel. He says your name again—_Tim_—although this time it doesn't sound so distorted and foreign but louder, so deafening you want to pull a Vincent van Gogh and cut off your own ears just to make it stop, make time and the world and breathing _stop_.

You open your eyes and can't see anything but blurred headlights and a hand, reaching out for yours.

* * *

><p>The only moments you allow yourself to remember are cut-up fragments of a person you used to be, wanted to be, could never be.<p>

Gray snow dark enough it could be considered black; low laughter and worthless sneers and scuffed boot marks on hardwood bar floors and the bittersweet smell of cigar smoke lingering on leather jackets; brown liquid, the color of piss, sitting in a bottle shoved away in your closet waiting for you when you got home; chapped lips, rubyred and frozen around your cock, waiting for your hands to tilt her head this way or that, because she wasn't your girlfriend and you weren't her father.

They are fleeting, worthless memories, but they keep you from thinking—at least, for a little while—that Dallas Winston was dead long before he hit the ground. Until the knots in your stomach retie themselves around each other and the restless twitching in your limbs start again because you want to hit something, hit _anything, _and you're choking on your own spit because you're trying to forget how to forget.

You curl your fingers into your palms, and when you open your hands you're not surprised to see somebody else's blood pooling from your fingernails.

The alarm clock on the bedside table screams in fat red letters that it's sometime past two in the morning and not yet near five o'clock in the afternoon. Too delirious to have finished crawling towards the bed, you lay down on the floor and stared up at the ceiling for what felt like hours, sweating everything and your balls off.

According to Dr. Curly Shithead Shepard, you have a fever. One-hundred-and-three-point-one degrees Fahrenheit. You're too poor to afford any insurance, let alone go to the hospital and get admitted. What little money you do earn from a part-time job working with Darrel Curtis at some construction company has barely been able to keep the bills from overflowing the mailbox, and it's only a matter of time before the house gets foreclosed on and Angela realizes that you're not as smart as your high school diploma says you are.

The bedroom door creaks open and you see a shadow press itself into the walls. Black on white, your bastard of a brother is your best half and your worst self all at once and you can't say you're proud to be related to him, but right now he's the only reason why you're still here, breathing, _alive,_ and you fucking hate him.

He'd found you just when you'd finally succeeded in losing yourself; the least he can do is leave you the hell alone, although no matter how much you will yourself to believe it, you know he won't.

"How are you feeling?" He asks, his voice an octave higher than it should be, and once again you're thankful for all this darkness, this empty space around you, ready to swallow you whole if you'll let it—because if he were to turn on the light and find you on the ground with your face all twisted up-like, he'd probably shit his pants and then some.

So you roll onto your side, wooden splinters digging into your arm, and say the first word you can think of, the letters rolling off your tongue and strangling into something that sounds like _fine _but sounds more like _gin_, or _thyme._

You've always been a loner, and because of this one of the acquired social skills of so-called small talk is nonexistent. You don't like talking in general, so conversations with other people are usually very awkward and straight-laced, long lapses of silence usually easier to listen to than someone else's voice.

A couple of minutes pass by, and its quiet enough that you have to hold your own breath just to make sure he's still breathing. From the odd angle you're lying at, if you lift your head up you'll be able to see the tips of his sneakers, faded and worn-out from when they used to be yours.

Curly sighs, all the polluted air rushing into his mouth, and you imagine him running a hand down his face, exasperated because, _oh dear Lord_, "you haven't eaten in days, Tim", and you wonder when you started to go missing.

Your voice comes out muffled, face pressed into the floorboards. "What day is it?"

"Monday."

That means it's been two days since you've had a cigarette, two days since you've had a shot of whiskey, two days since Dallas stopped breathing, the fucker…

Shit.

You swallow in the dust on the floor and cough hard enough a wincing pain shoots down your ribcage.

The rumble was Saturday night, but there are still open cuts on your lip waiting to be covered, palms scarred with gravelly bits of dirt and rocks; bruises and blood smeared on your face from your broken nose that you haven't set back. Your arms and legs are deadweights, and you feel as if you have been tossed into the ocean and are slowly sinking, farther and farther down until you finally succumb to the blackness of the tide rolling over your head.

Curly's voice, however, pulls you back. "Do you remember what happened?"

"What the fuck kinda game are we playin', kid, Twenty Questions?" You don't mean to sneer at him, and your face burns, though you're not ashamed.

That night you'd gone to Buck's as usual to get drunk, celebratory-like, and, about an hour later, shitfaced and hollow, refused a ride from Steve Randle and tried to find your way home using the streetlights as your guide. You'd given up about a couple of blocks from your neighborhood, and Curly had found you lying in the gutter, passed out and covered in your own vomit.

You don't remember much of what happened after that. Only that, sometime between the rumble ending and your long walk home, the Cade kid had died in his hospital bed and Dallas had been shot down in a parking lot because he'd done what you could never do: torn off his skin and exposed himself underneath all those swirling lights—the deepest, darkest parts—words wrapped around his spine and cigarettes stuffed between his arteries.

Suicide—in a sick, twisted kind of way, you think it's almost a funny word, except you're the one that got away, survived. Is left to believe it when there is nothing really left to believe, after all.

* * *

><p>Tuesday is marked by a period of blackness and sleep.<p>

The day of the funeral—Wednesday—is colorless, a watery sunrise and the taste of vomit in your mouth as you stand in the shower, trying to scrub off the imaginary feeling of everyone else's' hands on your skin so hard that, afterwards, blood is swirling down the drain and the tips of your fingers are raw, nails bitten down to the quick.

You've always hated funerals—the last one you went to was for your mother's estranged brother, Allen—the person you'd been named after, who lived off cigars and Italian food and smelled like moth balls whenever he rarely visited. You were thirteen; he was fifty-three.

Time changes people. It's a common fact, whether you like it or not, and as each minute passes with you standing in front of the mirror forcing a comb through your damp hair, the steam dripping off the glass, you wonder when you started to look less like yourself and more like a stranger, one you didn't recognize at all.

* * *

><p>"Well, aren't you a sight for sour eyes."<p>

She turns on you almost instantly, eyes half-closed and bloodshot, flecks of mascara dancing on her too-prominent cheekbones that poke out from under her pale skin. Her hair is two shades darker than it was the last time you saw her, posture slouched, heels sunk into the mud.

She tilts up her chin to look at you, voice quivering when she says, "You look nice," and you feel ashamed that you haven't seen her since God knows when. You're painfully reminded that she would've been a beautiful woman if she wasn't such a whore. How could you have forgotten that?

"Thanks." Your response is dry and ungrateful.

For once, however, you're glad you're not the only one precariously avoiding eye-contact with the crowd surrounding the two caskets ready to be swallowed up by the ground. You can't focus on anything—your nerves are twisted and torn, fingers tapping against your thigh—one two three, one two three—the faces all streaming into one person, their head bowed, white shirts and black slacks and shined shoes.

You take another step forwards, closing the distance between you and her. The Father's words are lost in the way Sylvia sounds when she croaks your name—_Tim_—and the sharp, distant pain of how her fingernails feel digging into your arm, trying to hold onto the life you both couldn't save. It is closure; at least for a little while, but like everything else, will never be enough.


	2. Chapter Two

It comes back unannounced, a burning ache that slides through your veins and into the hollow of your bones, crawling into the space between your lungs and infecting every last bit of your insides not already left to rot.

Hours have passed since the funeral ended and you still cannot fucking _breathe._ In a chaotic, final burst, the sun had bled across the skyline sometime between you pushing Sylvia into your car and letting her crawl out onto Buck Merril's porch. You don't plan on heading home until she's dropped off at hers, but if it takes a couple of nights with her crying herself to sleep while she shares a bed with you upstairs inside the roadhouse, then so be it.

You glance at her out from your peripheral, watching as her shaky fingers fumble around the empty air for the cigarette you've decided to share. The aura of neon lights above your heads, declaring the bar still open, is the only source of light for miles on this long stretch of deserted road. Night is endless, an insurmountable lapse of darkness stretching from one moment to the next.

She's trying to say something, although you can't understand between her choked sighs and the cracking sound of your windpipe as you try to remember how to breathe—God knows you can barely hear over the thousands of other voices inside your head. You like to think that the only reason you're putting up with Sylvia's shit right now is because of Dallas, but fuck it if you're gonna tell yourself otherwise.

* * *

><p>You'd met him during an Indian summer, the kind where the air is the dust and the days are long and lazy, full of nosebleeds and a sun the color of egg yolks.<p>

He'd come into Tulsa like a bull in a china shop—messy, distracted, wrecking havoc on anything and anyone damned enough to be in its path—and you were distraught, not by how much he seemed to act and talk and _be _like you, but how he_ was_. Bright and burning and broken, a splotch of color living in the black-and-white movies, he was infamous—ready to hit the ground and hit it hard.

You hated yourself because you couldn't hatehim, and for some goddamned reason you still couldn't like him, either. His father was a drunken Army veteran and his mother was a Catholic whore; what little education he had was far and few between, the rules and the ways of the streets a part of his DNA.

If anything, he was the toughest bastard you'd ever met, and for awhile you wondered how he could walk straight with a stick shoved so far up his ass. Most of all he was catastrophic, and you envied him for that—how easy it seemed to encompass the whole world with a single look in his eyes.

That summer you were looking for someone to hate and he was looking for somewhere to belong. Two halves of a whole, if you pulled back he would push forwards, always running to find the next best place to be since where you weren't was more fun than where you were, always wanting, now, now, now.

* * *

><p>The noise is what wakes you.<p>

There is some kind of commotion going on downstairs—boots scuffing against the floor, chairs being dragged, low laughter and cursing as glass is shattered—and you figure it'd be about time to pull your ass out of bed and see what those shitheads are doing this fine morning. That is, if you were able to open your fucking eyes.

Your eyelashes are stuck together like they've been glued, and it takes a couple of times trying to blink before you're able to get them open.

Your vision blurs for a second before outlining the curve of Sylvia's body next to you, who is still sleeping. She's facing you, her legs curled up into her chest in a fetal position, and right now you think, in all this white sound, she looks more beautiful than you've ever seen her. She's shivering despite how hot it is in the room, and once again you feel that desperate ache in the bottom of your stomach begin to expand as a distant voice reminds you that you're definitely not supposed to be in bed—especially in one with _her._

You thought you learned what _cold_ meant when you'd nearly lost your fingers trying to rescue Curly from the quarry a couple of winters ago because the fucker didn't know how to swim. Obviously, you hadn't.

Your brain throbs against your skull in tune to the rise and lowering pitch of voices in the bar. Limbs aching, you get out of bed and reach for your shirt hanging off the knob post, tugging it on over your head. It's smeared with mascara and still damp in places where Sylvia had pressed her face into it last night, along with the pillowcases and the bed sheets and whatever else she stumbled into before face-palming the mattress.

You look away, then, annoyed at yourself for paying the slightest bit of attention to her. It's not that you don'tlike her; it's just that, sometimes, you don't know why she bothers to pretend you're as close to her as she is to you.

The rush of noise you heard earlier has subsided to a low, distant hum through the floorboards. Your jeans are stiff from sleeping in them, fingers tapping against your thigh for a cigarette while you slip into your shoes and jacket. Sunlight streams in through the broken blinds, everything suddenly too white and too real for your liking.

Her voice is what stops you from leaving: "Tim?"

"Yeah, Sylvia?" Something inside of you hurts to say her name.

She sits up, half-asleep and hung over, pulling the bed sheets to her chest to cover up the skin you don't want to remember touching, because it might be another morning in another room with another girl, but it's all the fucking same. "You'll come back for me, won't you?"

You step outside and close the door before you let yourself go back in.

* * *

><p>He'd come over to your house one night in the middle of a winter.<p>

It must've been at least three in the morning when, after throwing a mixture of snow/ice balls at your second-story window from the street, he'd sulked across the lawn and pounded his fist against the door—bang bang bang_—_and didn't stop until you opened it_. _The sound was so atrociously disturbing in all that strange silence,like gunshots, and instead of worrying about why he was standing on your front porch at such an ungodly time, the only thing you could think of was that you prayed to God your mother wouldn't wake up.

He grunted a hello and stumbled past you, his shoulder banging into yours a little too roughly on his way to the couch, where he sat down on the edge, drunk and tentative. The burning, sour smell of alcohol and cigarettes and sweat and blood hung on his clothes, thickening the air as you made your way through the darkness towards him.

Three things happened at once. You'd sneered, "What the fuck are you doing here, Dallas?" and turned on the living room light just as he shrouded away from it—as if a single, distant ray could burn him if he let it—and saw his face.

The poor light that illuminated the room did nothing to hide the hollow, bruise-like shadows under his eyes; nor the large, swollen gash along his cheek, the size of a hand print, and the smeared blood on the corner of his mouth and chin. His skin was pale, whiter than usual, and his hair was disheveled, like he hadn't slept in days.

A moment passed before you heard him breathe in, a painful, gasping sound that made you wince, as if his ribs were broken, or his head had been held underwater and he had finally broken through the surface. His eyes met yours, depthless and black.

"'Cause I had nowhere else to go," he lied.

You didn't have the energy to roll your eyes. All you said was, "You could've asked me first, before you decided to break the fuckin' door down and bleed to death in my living room. Shit, this ain't no fuckin' Salvation Army, Winston."

"I know."

And then Dallas hung his head in his hands.

* * *

><p>The moment you let yourself inside the house, Angela is on you, white on rice.<p>

"Where were you?"

Usually, it doesn't bother you that much—how she's nice enough to worry about whether you or Curly are passed out in a gutter somewhere or in someone's bed—but her question still sets you off.

"Don't worry about it," you mumble, stepping out of your shoes and walking past her into the kitchen as she trails behind, frowning. The house is cold and dark; blinds drawn shut to keep out the midday light, wooden floor groaning under your stocking-feet. You pull out a chair at the table, head spinning, and sit down.

You focus all your straining attention on watching Angela rummage through the cabinets above the sink for a plate. The stove is on and something's burning at the bottom of a skillet—eggs—and, for a second, suddenly realizing that you haven't ate anything since yesterday morning, you're thankful that she knows you so goddamned well to make you breakfast and not ask questions you don't know the answers to.

She serves you your eggs a couple minutes later and sits down across from you, wrapping her fingers around a coffee mug. She's still in her pajamas although it must be at least one in the afternoon, hair pulled away from her face, an old leather jacket of yours hanging off her bony frame. Angela may have a little bit of height to her, considering how small your mother is, but the top of her head—even with all those curls—barely reaches your shoulders.

You move your fork around your plate, scooping up a bite of egg into your mouth, Angela's eyes on yours all the while as she fills you in on all the gossip surrounding Ana Maria DeJesus and the pig she's going out with and how Charlie O'Brien wants to take her to the drive-in this weekend—"is that okay, Tim?"—and how Curly stayed up all night until six this morning because he's been stressed about you.

You curse at this. "For God's sake, Ang, why the fuck is he pullin' that shit again?"

"I dunno." She pauses and raises the mug to her lips, takes a sip, almost like she can't muster the next part without you freaking out. "Me and Curly've been worried 'bout you, Tim. Half the time you been home you're passed out. It's like…like…"

"Like what?"

She speaks into her coffee—"like you're_ runnin'_ from somethin'"—her voice so low you can barely understand.

Exasperated, you run a hand through your hair, the unfinished plate of eggs suddenly unappetizing. You swallow, turning your head away from her, towards the hole in the wall that Donny made when he punched his fist through it. "I ain't runnin' from nothin', Ang."

You both know, however, as convincing as you might be, it's still a lie.


End file.
